Chris McKinnon came to appreciate the sport of swimming, but it wasn’t love at first splash.

At age five, he was skeptical, in part because he didn’t care to swallow pool water.

“I wasn’t really that keen on it at that age,” he recalled. “It was scary. The water was over my head.”

As he grew older, McKinnon began to win medals and enjoy the competition. Swimming became a joy at times.

“There’s something about going through the water that feels good, natural,” he said last week in an interview. “When you push off and glide through the water, you feel like you’re part of the water.”

McKinnon won three state swimming titles for the Great Falls High School Bison, then swam in college for the California Institute of Technology’s Beavers, competing in the NCAA Division III national championships for four straight years. He was one of only four swimmers in the school’s athletic history to accomplish that feat. McKinnon’s best finish at nationals was fourth place in the 400-meter individual medley.

Late last month, McKinnon was enshrined in the university’s Hall of Honor, in an event he attended on the Caltech campus in Pasadena with his wife, Arcolar, an elementary school teacher who is a graduate of the Air Force Academy and served in the U.S. Air Force.

“It was something of a surprise,” McKinnon said from Sacramento, Calif., where he teaches high school physics and chemistry. “It was nice. It’s always fun to go back.”

Individual medley, by the way, features four swimming strokes, in order: Butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle.

“I wasn’t good enough to do very well in one stroke, so I did ’em all,” McKinnon quipped. He figures his best stroke was the breaststroke.

Some athletes immediately fall in love with their sport. Others, like McKinnon, have mixed feelings. Tennis great Andre Agassi was at the other extreme; in a memoir he wrote he hated tennis.

McKinnon grew up in a family of competitive swimmers; he was coached as a teen by his grandfather, Gus McKinnon, who coached national YMCA swimming champions in Oakland, Calif. Gus’ brother, Archie McKinnon, twice was the Canadian Olympic swimming coach. Chris’ parents, Bob and Suzy McKinnon, began teaching swimming lessons in Great Falls in the 1960s. The first few years were so successful, Bob and Suzy built their own swimming pool on their property south of the Great Falls city limits. They still offer learn-to-swim lessons 45 years later.

“Being so much part of a family, I really didn’t have much of a choice,” Chris said. “It was like, ‘OK, we’re going to swim practice.’ I had the family tradition to uphold.”

As the years went by, Chris wanted to swim more. His late grandfather-coach, meanwhile, wasn’t a yell-and-scream guy; he was patient.

“He tried to get you to self-motivate,” Chris recalled. “He focused on swimming efficiency. We played games.”

Gus got Chris to think about ways to improve his swimming to produce better results. Chris became one of the fine swimmers in Great Falls athletic history. Another standout was Tyler Jourdonnais, who grew up in Great Falls, completed high school in Oregon, swam for the University of Arizona in the 1980s and took part in the 1984 U.S. Olympic swimming trials in 1984. But the competition is tough; Jourdonnais didn’t reach the finals in his favorite event, the 100-meter backstroke.

Chris, whose hometown is Great Falls, was honored as one of the best swimmers ever to wear Division III Caltech’s orange-and-black colors. Of course, Caltech is better known as one of the world’s top technical universities, and 34 of its alumni and faculty have won Nobel Prizes. But it also sports an athletic program, and the young man from Montana did the university proud by swimming, diving and playing water polo, as well as attending school. He finished in four years with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering.

Caltech unveiled its brand-new physical Hall of Honor display that includes a television slide show, a mural that includes every Hall of Honor member along with other notable former and current student-athletes, coaches and teams.

Chris at the NCAA championships finished fourth place in the 400-meter individual medley; seventh place in the 200-meter individual medley; and he had back-to-back eighth-place finishes in the 400 individual medley. When he finished his career at Caltech, Chris held 14 program records, and he still held four of those records entering this academic year.

Chris was a six-time Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference swimming champion, twice a runnerup, and he was one of just two former swimmers to earn the Campbell Trophy, a most valuable swimmer award, all four years. Not resting on his laurels, McKinnon also starred on the Caltech water polo team, earning All-SCIAC honors three times and one Coach’s Cup, the equivalent of a most valuable player prize. He capped his career by winning Caltech’s Outstanding Athlete recognition award for the 1982-83 season.

He also coached the Great Falls Guppies in 1983. His sister, Wendy, a 1983 Great Falls High School graduate, was a fine swimmer at Division III Kenyon College in Ohio in the mid-1980s, swimming individual medley races and the breast stroke. She just missed an All-American award one year at Kenyon College by about one-thousandth of a second in a swimming category, her mother, Suzy, recalled. Wendy McKinnon, who is married and lives in Burlington, Vt., still swims three times a week, Suzy said.

If Chris shined at swimming, he figures he had more fun playing water polo.

“There’s more of a team aspect to it; it’s a game,” he mused. It’s also grueling, “a wrestling match in the water,” he said. People can lose five or 10 pounds in a game, swimming and treading water and trying to score goals or defend.

Suzy isn’t surprised he felt that way.

“Swimming is such an individual thing,” she said Sunday.

Chris has lived and worked around the country. While in Seattle in 1986, he played on the U.S. North water polo developmental team at the National Sports Festival in Houston, and he helped coached the U.S. East water polo team to victory as assistant coach at the National Sports Festival in 1994 while teaching in Pennsylvania.

He has a son by a previous marriage, 26-year-old Maxwell Angus McKinnon, who lives and works in the Silicon Valley in California.

Suzy McKinnon says she and Bob are proud of their son and his induction into the Hall of Honor.

“He was an outstanding athlete and swimmer,” his mother said.

Bob offered this wisecrack: “Chris claims I threw him in at the Great Falls college pool, and I think maybe I did, but it had nothing to do with swimming.”

Chris now teaches at Grant High, an urban Sacramento school where about half the students are Hispanic, 20 percent each are black and Asian, and another 10 percent are of miscellaneous ethnic backgrounds. There are success stories: One of his students recently gained a full-ride scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley to study physics.

Chris acknowledges it made sense for a blond-haired swimmer from Montana to attend college in Southern California. He has landed in Northern California in the state capital, Sacramento, close to the beach and the mountains, wine country and the Bay Area.

“I do miss Montana from time to time,” Chris says. He returns to visit every summer or two.

In 2016, it’s a bit of a shame one of the finest swimmers in Caltech history no longer swims.

“I had both my knees replaced,” explained the 55-year-old McKinnon. When he swims for long, it hurts. Other than that, he said, “my health is very good.”

Richard Ecke writes a weekly column on city life. Reach him at recke@greatfallstribune.com; call him at 406-791-1465, or follow him @GFTrib_REcke on Twitter.